On Mondays during the NHL lockout, Sporting News will present radical—and, in most cases improbable—proposals designed to get the league back on track and ensure its long-term health. The eighth in that series: changing the salary cap system to help teams make money.

By instituting a salary cap after the 2004-05 lockout, NHL owners got long-desired cost certainty. The problem was, it turned out that was not what they wanted, as evidenced by this year’s lockout in spite of a record $3.3 billion in hockey-related revenue last season.

What the owners really want is profit certainty. By continuing to propose a salary cap system based on league-wide revenues, they will never get it. The last seven years should have made that clear, but apparently have not. The problem, as has become evident to more and more observers as the lockout has dragged on—Larry Brooks wrote about it in Sunday’s New York Post, and David Shoalts in the Globe and Mail—is the floor.

Why the NHL hasn’t built its public case around these teams, instead of going with a blanket “we feel we’re paying players too much” campaign, is anyone’s guess. But the fact is, there are teams that are struggling to keep up with the heavyweight revenue generators, and it’s a race they will never win.

The problem for the lower-revenue teams is easy to grasp, and it’s not one that will change simply by going to a 50-50 split of revenues. Growth in league revenue means growth in an aggregate figure, not growth evenly split among 30 franchises. If the New York Rangers decide to raise ticket prices because of the simple economics of supply and demand for seats at Madison Square Garden, or if the Detroit Red Wings negotiate a higher rate for their local television broadcasts, those big-market teams reap all of the benefits of their good business, while the Islanders and Blues see their payroll obligations rise as a result of the bump to the HRR pool.

It should not take a blue-ribbon panel of economists to figure out that after several years of this, the disparity between thriving and struggling clubs will only grow, with the latter group having virtually no chance of profitability because of its out-of-line payroll costs. The idea of lowering the salary floor would only serve to hide the problem long enough to survive until the next CBA—a band-aid on a bullet wound.

If the NHL really wants profit certainty for all 30 of its clubs, and not just certainty of exceptionally high profits for its most powerful owners, it cannot treat all 30 teams as financial equals when they very clearly are not. This is not the NFL, where the main source of revenue is a massive national television contract, and local TV rights, one of the NHL’s greatest sources of both revenue and financial disparity, don’t exist outside of the preseason.

Instead of trying to apply a league-wide salary structure, the NHL should base the salary cap and floor on the revenues of individual teams, after revenue-sharing payments have been made. In addition to disconnecting small-market teams from a system in which they have no hope of keeping pace, those teams would have an incentive to grow their business, both in order to be able to put a more competitive team on the ice and to increase their profit margins. Fans in those markets also would have more reason to spend money, as they would be legitimately supporting their favorite team.

Obviously, there would be an enormous gap in payrolls. For the 2010-11 season, Forbes reported that the Toronto Maple Leafs brought in $193 million in revenue, compared to $63 million for the Islanders. The midpoint was $96 million for the San Jose Sharks Sharks and Edmonton Oilers. Applying a 50-50 split, you would be looking at a salary cap in the $96 million range for Toronto, $58 million in San Jose and Edmonton, and $31 million on Long Island for 2011-12.

Not only allowing, but mandating, that the Maple Leafs compete with a payroll more than triple that of the Islanders may not seem fair for competitive balance. Guess what? It’s not—because here’s the thing: Competitive balance is a pipe dream. Under a system in which team payrolls have been linked to league-wide revenues, the past five Stanley Cup champions have come from Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles. In addition to winning on the ice, high-revenue teams have the added benefit of payrolls forcefully dropped to below-market rates, which is having your cake and eating it, too. If the current system leads to small-market clubs holding onto talent, why isn’t Rick Nash still in Columbus, or Ryan Suter still in Nashville, or Zach Parise in New Jersey?

By requesting a trade, Nash basically created his own free agency, and dictated where he landed; the upside for the Blue Jackets was that they were able to get a return for him. The Minnesota Wild previously were on the other end of this equation, having lost Marian Gaborik as a free agent to the Rangers, but this summer (maybe because owner Craig Leipold anticipated a reduction in player costs as a result of a new CBA?) decided to start throwing cash around as if the Twin Cities had been annexed by Canada.

Big-market teams will always use their financial clout to lure top talent, and will always have a competitive advantage unless payrolls are made uniform league-wide—in which case the rich clubs would just delight in ever-higher profits while their poorer cousins spend outside their means to achieve their mandated outlay.

A team losing money because it cannot afford the salary floor has a choice: cut spending elsewhere and hope to make up the difference, or just lose money year in and year out. Neither option is good for the longterm health of the club, which is a big part of why the Islanders so desperately needed to get the hell out of Nassau Coliseum and hope that a move to Brooklyn will be enough of a financial game-changer to make them competitive. As it is, the Isles’ payroll does not reflect their true salary outlay—by effectively using loopholes in the old CBA, they have $50.2 million in 2012-13 cap hits on their current ledger, but only $41.3 million in actual salaries.

A team whose salary structure locks in profits on an incremental scale with revenues, on the other hand, has every reason to increase those revenues and make investments in long-term projects that will benefit the health of the team, the way that Flyers Skate Zone rinks have popped up around the Philadelphia metropolitan area, extending the team's brand and the area's connection with hockey.

For the Islanders, who do operate the IceWorks facility on Long Island now, expanding their reach and investment in the New York area now could pay dividends by putting them in position to sign Clark Gillies' grandson to a long-term deal in 2040. There's no quick fix for the minnows to catch up to the sharks, but there are many quick ways for the minnows to be eaten, starting with maintaining the CBA's links between league revenues and team spending.

Instead of making increased payroll a burden, make it a reward, and a symptom of growing profitability. The NHL and the NHLPA both benefit in the long run, and with teams removed from the equation as their own worst financial enemies, maybe we could all avoid having to go through this nonsense again.